In China there is an office suite that increasingly competes directly with Microsoft Office. This is WPS Office, a local alternative that has just surpassed 100 million daily users in the Asian giant and, this time, seems willing to regain its lost leadership.
The company behind WPS Office, currently called Kingsoft Office, launched the first word processor for the DOS system in Chinese in 1988. This was a great advantage for the product, which was available five years before Microsoft Office landed in the aforementioned market.
Kingsoft Office wants to reign again
Although Kingsoft Office had achieved a very important user base, the Redmond giant’s suite began to quickly gain market share. For contain the flight of usersthe company made the personal version of its office suite free for three months.
Years later, in 2011, it found a new opportunity to once again be a relevant player in the Chinese market: it launched a mobile version of WPS Office, and it did so once again before its competitor Microsoft. For decades, this Beijing-based firm has sought to gain market share in its country.
Part of its strategy to achieve this has been to offer an experience very similar to that of Microsoft Office. At first glance it is difficult to differentiate which program is being watched. Application icons, their corresponding interfaces, They look like a direct copy of the Redmond company software.
The recent push, however, is happening for other reasons. According to the Hong Kong newspaper SCMP, China has been trying to replace Western hardware and software with domestic alternatives for some time. Since WPS Office is also compatible with Microsoft Office, customers have little reason not to switch.
The wave of new clients for Kingsoft Office is coming from strategic sectors such as el government, finance and telecommunications. If this trend continues, Microsoft Office could lose the ground it still has in the Asian giant’s market, although it is not clear when this could happen.
In Spain and other countries, the Microsoft and Google suites are the most popular. However, WPS Office can also be used in this part of the planet. In the past we have included it among our free alternatives to the Microsoft product, and some members of our team have even tried it on mobile phones.
Images | Kingsoft Office
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